Finding Beauty in the Journey

Tag Archives: respect

Imagine you’re sat in a room, on your own, and you’ve got 10 minutes to write 2000 words. If you fail or don’t do it to a high enough standard something REALLY bad will happen. You don’t know what it is but you KNOW it’s bad.
This is anxiety.
Crap, right? It gets worse.

On top of your impossible, potentially life or death challenge the room is full of cats. YOU ALONE are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of these cats. If something bad happens to just one of the cats that bad thing will happen to you too…..

It get’s worse still.
One of the cats eats and eats until it’s sick.
One of the cats won’t eat anything.
One of the cats is suicidal, one keeps intentionally injuring itself and another keeps injuring the others.
One is REALLY REALLY excited, one wants to exercise all day, another wants to do nothing, one is really sad and one is irrationally angry and near impossible to calm down.
If the greedy cat is sick. So are you. If the starving cat starves. So do you. You HAVE to protect these cats because if you fail YOU will face the consequences.
This is having parts.

There’s more.
On top of all this, on adjacent walls are two buttons. One green. One red. When the green one flashes you HAVE to stop everything, and press it. When the red one flashes you have to do the same… If you fail to press the green light you lose your income and consequently your place to live, ability to eat etc. If you fail to press the red one you fail to achieve your dreams, the reason you keep pressing forward. The reason you continue with this nonsense.
This is trying to keep on top of work and school.

Looking through the window of the room is everyone you care about most in the world. If don’t finish your work or if you let something happen to any of the cats you’ll hurt them too and they don’t understand why you’re hurting them. They take it personally and get upset.
You don’t mean to.
It just happens that way.
You try to hide the cats but they don’t like being hidden away… They always break free.
This is guilt.

THIS is what it’s like to have DID.

THIS is how every day feels (despite how I appear).

I keep going. In the hope. One day. I’ll be able to help someone going through the same thing have an easier time